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America's Army 2.7 (Overmatch) on Linux (WINE)

09-19-2006, 11:56 AM

Ryan Gordon (Icculus) had done a great job porting America's Army over to Linux (as well as Macintosh), but unfortunately his efforts were hampered by the game's budget, but more importantly the Windows developers began relying upon middle-ware not available under GNU/Linux or Macintosh. As he had outlined earlier this year he was originally brought on to do the Linux server port for America's Army, but later began porting the clients to Linux and Mac. Later the Linux/Macintosh client versions were canceled but he continued to volunteer his skills and provide releases when time permitted. However, now with new middle-ware appearing in the game that is specific to Windows, it was simply too much to handle.

GNU/Linux and Macintosh gamers haven't seen a new client since version 2.5 (after seeing no 2.4 release). America's Army 2.7 (Overmatch) was released last week, which became a massive update for this growing first person shooter. While no GNU/Linux client exists, the Windows version does perform fairly well within WINE. No Linux server of America's Army 2.7 has yet to be released by Ryan, but that still will likely be released in the coming days unless that has been canned as well.

Using WINE v0.9.20 the game does run mediocre, at least in the tests I have tried thus far. The system was using a clean install of Fedora Core 6 Test 3 with the ATI 8.28.8 drivers and WINE (v0.9.20) was obtained through Fedora Extras. Below are a few notes on this process to get AASF: Overmatch running under Linux.

Selecting other options within the installer will crash. The installer does work under WINE if using the multi-part package available from some mirrors. Using the full 2.5GB installer would crash when installing the files. However, to bypass those issues the game can be installed on a Windows computer followed by copying over the game files. Copying the C:\Program Files\America's Army over to WINE had worked. There was also no need to copy over any registry keys.

After copying over the game files or using the two-package installer, the game had run with very few issues. In fact, it had run smoother than anticipated though its performance was fairly limited on an ATI setup (in the process of trying it out on a NVIDIA Linux box). One important item to note is that Punk Buster is notorious with WINE at this stage, so unfortunately the game cannot be played on official servers or any PB servers for that matter.

A bit more information and notes are at Wine HQ. Feel free to use this thread to share your thoughts, questions, and experiences about running America's Army Special Forces: Overmatch under Linux with WINE.